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In Sebastian Faulks’s magnificent Great War novel Birdsong (1993), the depictions of the daily horrors of life in the trenches are interspersed with another storyline in which an elderly veteran’s grand-daughter decides to find out as much as she can about his experiences. She seems to have been created as a rebuke to those successive generations who had flinched from thinking about the Great War, and in doing so did not just fail to pay due honour to its heroes: they retarded the nation’s collective healing process.

Faulks caught, perhaps even precipitated, a change in the zeitgeist that led to the belated lionisation of the last centenarian Great War veterans, and these days our appetite for...